Blad met koppen 1840 - 1880

Johannes Tavenraat made this study of heads with pen and brown ink in the Netherlands sometime in the first half of the 19th century. Tavenraat was part of a generation of artists who trained at the academies and then sought to build a career on the basis of their skills in drawing and painting. This sheet is probably from a sketchbook and it shows Tavenraat practicing the skill of capturing different characters, probably in preparation for a larger history painting, genre scene, or portrait. The expressive faces are reminiscent of theater or the new art of caricature, which was gaining popularity in Europe in this period. We know that academies of art played an important role in standardizing the acceptable ways of representing the human body, and drawings like this one, which seem to experiment with physiognomy, suggest that there was also a popular interest in types that existed outside the academic canon. In order to fully understand the social implications of these images, the art historian would want to study the popular imagery of the time, including printed caricatures and illustrations.